Oil (filmed as There Will Be Blood) (37 page)

V Bunny came back into the house, and followed Dad into his study and shut the door. "Dad, are you really going to put up that money with Mr. Roscoe?" "Why, sure, son, I got to; why not?" Dad looked genuinely surprised—as he always did in these cases. You could never be sure how much of it was acting, for he was sly as the devil, and not above using his arts on those he loved. "Dad, you're proposing to buy the presidency of the United States!" "Well, son, you can put it that way—" "But that's what it is, Dad!" "Well, that's one way to say it. Another is that we're protecting ourselves against rivals that want to put us out of business. If we don't take care of politics, we'll wake up after election and find we're done for. There's a bunch of big fellows in the East have put up a couple of millions to put General Leonard Wood across. Are you rooting for him?" Bunny understood that this was a rhetorical question, and did not answer it. "It's such a dirty game, Dad!" "I know, but it's the only game there is. Of course, I can quit, and have enough to live on, but I don't feel like being laid on the shelf, son." "Couldn't we just run our own business, Dad?" It was, you may remember, a question Bunny had asked before. "There's no such thing, son—they're just crowding you all the time. They block you at the refineries, they block you at the markets, they block you in the banks—I don't tell you much about it, because it's troubles, but there's just no place in the business world for the little feller any more. You think I'm a big feller because I got twenty million, and I think Verne is a big feller because he's got fifty; but there's Excelsior Pete—thirty or forty companies, all working as one—that's close to a billion dollars you're up against. And there's Victor, three or four hundred million more, and all the banks and insurance company resources behind them—what chance have we independents got? Look at this slump in the price of gas right now—the newspapers tell you there's a glut, but that's all rot—what makes the glut, but the Big Five dumping onto the market to break the little fellers? Why, they're just wiping 'em off the slate!" "But how can public officials prevent that?" "There's a thousand things that come up, son—we got to land the first wallop—right at the sound of the bell! How do we get pipe line right-o'-ways? How do we get terminal facilities? You saw how it was when we came into Paradise; would we ever 'a got this development if I hadn't 'a paid Jake Coffey? Where would Verne and me be right now, if we didn't sit down with him and go over the slate, and make sure the fellers he puts on it are right? And now—what's the difference? Jist this, we got bigger, we're playin' the game on a national scale—that's all. If Verne and me and Pete O'Reilly and Fred Orpan can get the tracts we got our eyes on, well, there'll be the Big Six or Big Seven or Big Eight in the oil-game, that's all—and you set this down for sure, son, we'll be doin' what the other fellers done, from the day that petroleum came into use, fifty years ago." They were on an old familiar trail now, and Bunny knew the landscape by heart. "It's all very well for a feller to go off in his study and figure out how the world ought to be; but that don't make it that way, son. There has got to be oil, and we fellers that know how to get it out of the ground are the ones that are doing it. You listen to these Socialists and Bolshevikis, but my God, imagine if the government was to start buying oil-lands and developing them—there'd be more graft than all the wealth of America could pay for. I'm on the inside, where I can watch it, and I know that when you turn over anything to the government, you might just as good bury it ten thousand miles deep in the earth. You talk about laws, but there's economic laws, too, and government can't stand against them, no more than anybody else. When government does fool things, then people find a way to get round it, and business men that do it are no more to blame than any other kind of men. This is an oil age, and when you try to shut oil off from production, it's just like you tried to dam Niagara falls." It was a critical moment in their lives. In after years Bunny would look back upon it, and think, oh why had he not put his foot down? He could have broken his father, if he had been determined enough! If he had said, "Dad, I will not stand for buying the presidency; and if you go in with Mr. Roscoe on that deal, you've got to know that I renounce my inheritance, I will not touch a cent of your money from this day on. I'll go out and get myself a job, and you can leave your money to Bertie if you want to." Yes, if he had said that, Dad would have given way; he would have been mortally hurt, and Mr. Roscoe would have been hurt, but Dad would not have helped to nominate Senator Harding. Why didn't Bunny do it? It wasn't cowardice—he didn't know enough about life as yet to be afraid of it. He had never earned a dollar in his life, yet he had the serene conviction that he could go out and "get a job," and provide for himself those comforts and luxuries that were a matter of course to him. But the trouble was, he couldn't bear to hurt people. It was what Paul meant when he said that Bunny was "soft." He entered too easily into other people's point of view. He saw too clearly why Dad and Mr. Roscoe wanted to buy the Republican convention; and then, a few hours later, he would go over to the Rascum cabin, and sit down with Paul and "Bud" Stoner and "Jick" Duggan and the rest of the "Bolshevik bunch," and see too clearly why they wanted the oil workers to organize and educate themselves, and take over the oil wells from Dad and Mr. Roscoe!

VI

Bunny went back to Southern Pacific, and just as he was finishing his year's work, the convention of the Republican party met in Chicago, a thousand delegates and as many alternates, and as many newspaper correspondents and special writers, to tell the world about this mighty historic event. The convention listened to impressive "key-note" speeches, and smoked enormous quantities of tobacco, and drank enormous quantities of bootleg liquor; and meantime, in a room in the Blackstone Hotel, the half-dozen bosses who controlled the votes sat down to make their deals. In the millions of words that went out over the wires concerning the convention, the name of Vernon Roscoe was never mentioned; but he had his suite adjoining that hotel room, and he made exactly the right offers, and paid his certified checks to exactly the right men, and after a long deadlock and the taking of eight ballots, amid wild excitement on the convention floor, the support of General Leonard Wood began suddenly to crumble, and on the ninth ballot Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio became the Republican party's standard-bearer. College was over; and Gregor Nikolaieff went up to San Francisco to ship on one of the vessels of the "canning fleet," which went up to Alaska to catch and pack salmon. Rachel Menzies and her brother joined three other Jewish students who had equipped themselves with a battered Ford car, to follow the fruit-picking; moving from place to place, sleeping under the stars, and gathering apricots, peaches, prunes and grapes for the canners and driers. Bunny was the only one of the little group of "reds" who did not have to work all summer; and he was the only one who didn't know what to do with himself. In the old days, when he and Dad were drilling one well at a time, Bunny would pitch in and help at anything there was to do; he was only a "kid" then, and the men liked it. But now he was of age, and supposed to be dignified; the company was of age, too, a huge machine in which every cog had its place, and must not be interfered with. Bunny could not even cultivate the plants at home without trespassing on the job of the gardener! He had resolved to study some of Paul's books; but he had never heard of anyone studying eight hours a day, and he couldn't take Paul's job for part of the time, because he wasn't a good enough carpenter! It was a world in which some people worked all the time, and others played all the time. To work all the time was a bore, and no one would do it unless he had to; but to play all the time was equally a bore, and the people who did it never had anything to talk about that Bunny wanted to listen to. They talked about their play, just as solemnly as if it had been work: tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, polo matches—all sorts of complicated ways of hitting a little ball about a field! Now, it was all right, when you needed exercise and recreation, to go out and hit a little ball; but to make a life-work of it, to give all your time and thought to it, to practice it religiously, read and write books about it, discuss it for hours on end—Bunny looked at these fully grown men and women, with their elaborate outfits of "sports clothes," and it seemed to him they must be exercising a kind of hypnosis upon themselves, to make themselves believe that they were really enjoying their lives.

Bertie came along, making one more effort to drag her brother out into this play world, to which by right of inheritance and natural gifts he belonged. Bertie had broken off her affair with Eldon Burdick. He was a "dud," she told Bunny, and always wanting to have his own way. There was another affair on, a very desperate one, Bunny gathered, since his sister exposed her feelings even to him. It was the only son of the late August Norman, founder of Occidental Steel; the boy's name was Charlie, and he was a little wild, Bertie said, but oh, so fascinating, and rich as Croesus. He had nobody to take care of him but a rather silly mother, who was still trying to be young and giddy, dressing like a debutante, and having surgical operations performed on her face to keep it from "sagging." They had a most gorgeous yacht down at the harbor, and had asked Bertie to bring her brother, and why wouldn't he go and help her, as he so easily could, with his good looks and everything? Bunny thought his sister must indeed be hard hit, if she was counting upon his reluctant social charms! But he went; and as they drove to the harbor Bertie coached and scolded him—he must not talk about his horrible Bolshevik ideas, and if they mentioned his disgrace at Southern Pacific, he must make a joke of it. Bunny had already learned that that was the thing to do; and so he did it, and found that it was very easy, for Charlie Norman was one of those brilliant young persons who found something funny to say about everything that came up; if he couldn't do any better, he would make a bad pun out of your remark. Here was the "Siren," a floating mansion, all white paint and shining brass, finished in hand-carved mahogany, and upholstered in hand-painted silk. The sailors who shined and polished, and the Filipino boys who flitted here and there with trays full of glasses, were spick and span enough for the vaudeville stage. The party of guests would step into a launch, and from that into several motorcars, and be transported to a golf-links, and from there to a country club for luncheon; they would dance for an hour or two, and then be whirled away to a bathing-beach, and then to a tennis-court, and then back to the "Siren" to dress for dinner, which was served with all the style you would have expected at an ambassador's banquet. There would be many-colored electric lights on the deck, and an orchestra, and friends would come out in launches, and dance until dawn, while the waves lapped softly against the sides of the vessel, and the tangle of lights along the shore made dim the stars. These people talked about the appearance and peculiarities and adventures of all their acquaintances, and it was hard to follow their conversation unless you were one of their set; they even had slang words of their own, and the less possible it was for an outsider to understand them, the funnier they seemed to themselves. They talked about clothes, and what was going to be the newest "thing." They talked about their bootleggers, and who was reliable. For the rest of the time they talked about the hitting of little balls about a field; the scores they made that day and previous days, and the relative abilities of various experts in the art. Was the tennis-champion going to hold his own for another year? How were the American golf players making out in England? Was the polo team coming from Philadelphia, and would they carry off the cup? There were beautiful silver and gold-plated trophies with engraved inscriptions, which helped to hypnotize you into thinking that the hitting of little balls about a field was of major importance!

VIII

Sitting on the deck of this floating mansion, Bunny read about the famine on the Volga. The crops had failed, over huge districts, and the peasants were slowly starving; eating grass and roots, eating their dead babies, migrating in hordes, and strewing their corpses along the way. It was the last and final proof of the futility of Communism, said the newspaper editors; and if Charlie Norman did not take the occasion to do some "joshing" of Bunny, it was only because Charlie never read a newspaper. Bunny had talked with Harry Seager, and got a different view of famines in Russia. They were caused by drought, not by Communism; they had been chronic ever since the dawn of history, and their occurrence had never been taken as evidence of the futility of Tsarism. Conditions were bad now, because of the breakdown of the railroads. But people who blamed that on Communism overlooked the fact that the railroads had broken down before the revolution; and that under the Soviet administration they had had to stand the strain of three years of civil war, and of outside invasion on twenty-six fronts. Newspapers which had incited these invasions, and applauded the spending of hundreds of millions of American money to promote them, now blamed the Bolsheviks because they were not ready to cope with a famine! You can understand how a young man with such thoughts in his mind would not fit altogether into this play party. He tried his best to be like the others, but they found out that he was different; and presently Charlie's mother took to sitting beside him. "Bunny," she said—for you were Bunny or Bertie or Baby or Beauty to this crowd as soon as you had played nine holes of golf and had one drink out of anybody's hip-pocket flask—"Bunny, you go to the university, don't you? And I'm sure you study some." "Not very much, I fear." "I wish you would tell me how to get Charlie to study some. I can't get him to do anything but play and make love to the girls." Bunny wanted to say, "Try cutting off his allowance," but he realized that that would be one of those "horrid" things for which Bertie was always rebuking him. So he said, "It's quite a problem"— in the style of a diplomat or politician. "The young people are too much of a problem for me," said Charlie's mother. "They want to race about all day, and they just insist on dragging you with them, and it's getting to be more than I can stand." So then Bunny was sorry for Charlie's mother—he had supposed that she did all this "gadding" because she enjoyed it. To look at her, she was a nautical maid, plump but shapely, clad in spotless white and blue, with fluffy brown hair that the breeze was always blowing into her bright blue eyes. Bunny stole a glance now and then, and judged that the surgical operations upon her face must have been successes, for he saw no trace of them. "I've devoted my whole life to that boy," the nautical maid was saying, "and he doesn't appreciate it a bit. The more you do for people the more they take it as a matter of course. This afternoon I think I'll go on strike! Will you back me up?" So when the golfing expedition was setting out, Charlie announced, in a tone loud enough for the whole company, "Mum-sie's not going—she's got a crush on Bunny!" At which they all laughed merrily, and trooped down the ladder, secretly relieved to be rid of one of the old folks, who insisted on "tagging along," and trying to pretend to be one of the crowd, when it was perfectly evident that they were not and could not.